Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Jonathon Blake" <jonathon.blake AT gmail.com>]

Nancy wrote:

> All of those "all rights reserved" texts are completely out of the question 
> for our purposes, as we cannot violate copyright laws since we re-distribute the texts.

Those "All Rights Reserved" texts _might_ be usable by you, _IF_ you
ask permission.

If you think that people are willing to let their work be used for
your project, gratis, if only they knew about it, then the "All Rights
Reserved" crowd would make a good choice of people to target.

> the problem is that the CC makes it pretty clear that the "By/Attribute/non-commercial" license 
> is the "right" one to use, and therefore very few authors use "By".

The CC website makes it pretty clear that the most _popular_ licence
is "NonCommercial".

> I am trying to make it clear that there is another purpose that the CC 
> licenses do not address.

There are at least half a dozen other usages that CC does not address.

> it is however impossible for us to contact every web author and ask for such 
> permission.

Lets see.
* Webbot finds a new text.
* Webbot fires off an email.
* Mailbot responds to email.
* Human verifies that the answer was satisfactory.
* Mergebot grabs the text from the web, and adds it to your existing corpus.
* Langbot analyzes the text, and throws the results into the
appropriate database.

Expenses are:
* Cost of writing the bots;(Free, if you get somebody to donate the time.)
* Cost of the time of the human to verify that the bot wrote n
appropriate response;
* Cost of time of the human, writing an appropriate response when the
mailbot is wrong; (Probably more refined boilerplate/fill in the
blanks messages than the mailbot uses.)
* Cost of  new hard drives, because the project is acquiring 10 - 20
GB of new text per day;
* Cost of  dedicated computer ( $2K from your local white box
assembler.   Most of the money is for the cost of the hard drives.  )

I don't see what makes that scenario impossible.  Expensive, because
the hard drive gets filled up every fortnight, but not impossible.

> Our issue with CC is simply, why couldn't there be a license that allows for 
> research use, along the lines I described?

You could always propose it.  whether or not it would be incorporated
into the current mix is another question.  At best, it would be an
optional addition.  So instead of CC-SA, there would have CC-SA &
CC-SA-R.  Don't get your hopes up that people will use the "R" option.

> serious misunderstanding of the linguistics and computational linguistics 
> communities and their research.

The misunderstanding is more along the lines of why don't you ask for
permission in the first place?   That way you can include a far
broader spectrum of usages than you will find with the CC licenses and
their kith.

xan

jonathon
--
Ethical conduct is a vice.
Corrupt conduct is a virtue.

Motto of Nacarima.